Sports Supplements: Now With Methamphetamine!

A new study finds (once again) that you may get more than you bargained for in sports supplements.

As I've written before, I think vitamins and other supplements are vastly overrated. Basically, I think they don't do anything in the vast majority of cases. But there's another side to the argument that I don't usually pay much attention to, which is the possibility of actual harm from supplements. For a story I was researching recently, I had a chance to chat with Pieter Cohen, a doctor and researcher at Harvard. His focus is on the dangerous ingredients that regularly find their way into common supplements due to the laughable lack of regulation in the supplement industry.

Now, I mostly don't worry too much about this, because I figure the people who are going online to order purported muscle-builders and dodgy sexual enhancers (ahem, LaShawn Merritt excepted) mostly don't care what's in them and would actually be secretly happy if there were off-label steroids or whatever in them. But the problem seems to be much more widespread and mainstream than I would have guessed.

For example, Cohen and his colleagues just published an article in the journal Drug Testing and Analysis about finding an unlabeled methamphetamine(!) analog in a mainstream pre-workout supplement called Craze; the samples they purchased came from GNC and the Natural Health Shoppe, and the supplement was named "New Supplement of the Year" by bodybuilding.com in 2012. (It's also in the running for Pre-Workout Supplement of the Year in 2013.) USA Today published a great investigative piece a few months ago on the convicted criminal who makes the supplement; he's been in trouble several times before for putting untested steroids into sports supplements. The same meth analog also shows up in another supplement (Detonate, by Gaspari Nutrition). The manufacturers claim is that the supplement's power comes from an extract of a Chinese herb called dendrobium, but the new study makes it clear that this is utter fiction – in the same way that manufacturers claimed that DMAA (a hugely popular amphetamine-type sports supplement that was finally pulled last year) came from geraniums.

Okay, this is still a muscle-building supplement, which is a sector most people assume is a bit of a Wild West even when you're buying in GNC. Even more bizarre was the recall in August of vitamins from a company called Purity First when the FDA found that their Healthy Life vitamin B supplements contained the anabolic steroids dimethazine and methasterone! It subsequently turned out that the company's vitamin C and multi-mineral pills also contained steroids, causing at least 29 people to become ill. This may be a case of contaminated ingredients or manufacturing problems; either way, it's bad news if you took those pills. (Though, to be fair, not as bad as the outbreak of acute hepatitis that the FDA reported in Hawaii on Friday among people taking the sports supplement OxyElite Pro. It contains an untested drug called N-[2-hydroxy-2(4-methoxyphenyl) ethyl]-3-phenyl-2-propenamide; of the 29 victims so far, two have received liver transplants and one is dead.)

There are a few different messages we could extract from these events:

(a) If you take supplements, only trust reputable companies, for example those whose products are certified by NSF Certified for Sport.

(b) The supplement industry should be regulated more like drugs: companies should have to show that their ingredients are safe and effective before going to market instead of the other way around. [Update: check out this 2009 Sports Illustrated piece for more insight on the politics of why supplements are regulated the way they are.]

(c) Before you take a supplement, think carefully about whether there's really any evidence that it will benefit you, and whether there's any risk that it will harm you.